Call centers that handle inbound calls have traditionally been managed in a reactive mode: call center supervisors staffed and released agents and moved agents between splits in response to peaks and valleys in call volumes as reflected in the lengths of queues of incoming calls waiting to be handled. This is undesirable, because the inherent delay in responding to changing call volumes and types causes the responses to lag behind the changing conditions. Therefore, proactive call-center management information systems have been developed which try to anticipate call volumes and types, and changes therein, and thereby try to eliminate the delay between changing conditions and responses thereto. An example of such a system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,185,780. Such proactive systems typically use historical data from previous days or other time periods to predict agent staffing and agent skill needs. However, it is difficult to anticipate short-term changes in call volumes and types accurately from such data e.g., intra-hour or even shorter fluctuations in calling volumes and types.
Recently, call centers have come into existence that are able to interact with users of the Internet. They usually work as follows. An Internet user uses a browser on his or her Internet terminal to contact a World-Wide Web page of a call-center customer on a Web server, in a conventional manner. The page may have a virtual button or some other software-based indicator by means of which the user may indicate a desire to speak with a representative of the customer. If the user makes use of the indicator, the user is prompted to enter his or her telephone number. This number is conveyed to the server, which in turn sends it to the customer's call center. The call center then uses the supplied telephone number to place a standard outbound call to the user's telephone. An illustrative example of such a call center is disclosed in "Rockwell Teams with Dialogic to Build Groupware Servers for Small Centers", Computer Telephony, Vol. 4, Issue 4 (April 1996), p.112.